While she ultimately became a world-renowned etiquette maven, Emily Post (1872-1960) was also a female automotive pioneer who firmly established herself as a formidable travel journalist. The zenith of this part of the Baltimore-born Post’s writing career was arguably her participation in an automobile journey from New York City to San Francisco in 1915.
This 27-day expedition took place during an era when traveling by automobile from one coast to the other was a rare and even frowned upon endeavor for women to pursue. Ever the pacesetter, Post embarked on such a trek only six years after Alice Huyler Ramsey and her three female passengers became the first women to complete a cross-country automobile trip. Unlike Ramsey, Post did not do any of the driving. This task was handled instead by her son Edwin, who was a student at Harvard University at the time. Her cousin Alice Beadleston became a last-minute addition to this transcontinental motorized tour.
Throughout the trip, Post proved herself to be an adventuresome as well as fastidious passenger who wrote down just about every detail of what the three of them encountered each day along the way. In doing so, she crafted a groundbreaking travelogue that captured and conveyed what was then a woman’s unique perspective on roaming via the “horseless carriage” from sea to shining sea.
The highlights of this journey included visits to landmarks such as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. In addition, Post was meticulous about describing those hotels that she found to be the most appealing and which hotels struck her as downright appalling. She was similarly unsparing in her narratives on everything from the muddier portions of the route that they traveled on to their vehicle’s periodic mechanical breakdowns. Post’s account of the trip was subsequently published as a series of articles in Collier’s magazine. This series, in turn, eventually became a book titled By Motor to the Golden Gate.
“Mrs. Post is witty and captious, entirely charming in that she is not without humor even when exasperated,” noted the Los Angeles Times in its review of her book. “Very plain spoken she is bout the hotels at which she stopped, and her comments on many towns and cities through which she passed are of a nature unlikely to make public-spirited citizens wish a popular success for her book.” This review then stated, “However, it deserves wide reading, by both prospective transcontinental tourists and by those who wish to travel by proxy.”
Seven years after Post made that cross-country trek with her son and cousin, her first book on etiquette was published. While the rules of decorum rather than the thrill of travel on the open road had clearly become Post’s literary focus by this time, that 1922 book shows how transportation was never too far from her thoughts after all. “Never take more than your share — whether of the road in driving a car, of chairs on a boat or seats on a train, or food at the table,” she asserted in that best-selling work on etiquette.
Image Credit: Public Domain
For more information on Emily Post’s transcontinental automobile trip in 1915, please check out https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/she-was-etiquette-authority-emily-post-was-road-warrior-180964806/
Transportation History 
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